The Institute for Defense Analyses - Center for Computing Sciences is a
nonprofit research center that works closely with the NSA. Our center
has around 60 researchers (roughly 30 mathematicians and 30 computer
scientists) that work on interesting
and hard problems. The plan for the seminar is to begin with a short
mathematics talk on a project that was completed at IDA-CCS and
declassified, then tell you a little about what we do, and end with your
questions. The math that we will discuss involves
symbolic dynamics and automata theory. Specifically we will develop a
metric on the space of regular languages using topological entropy.
This work was completed during a summer SCAMP at IDA-CCS. SCAMP is a
summer program where researchers from academia
(professors and students), the national labs, and the intelligence
community come to IDA-CCS to work on the agency's hard problems for 11
weeks.